I subscribe to the school of nutritional thought that counsels us to eat the same foods people ate in the past because, after all, that’s how we got here. It’s how we’re designed to eat. Epigenetics supplies the scientific support for the idea by providing molecular evidence that we
are who we are, in large part, because of the foods our ancestors ate. But because healthy genes, like healthy people, can perform well under difficult conditions for a finite amount of time, there is, in effect, a delay in the system. Since nutritional researchers don’t ask study participants what their parents ate, the conclusions drawn from those studies are based on incomplete data. A poor diet can seem healthy if studied for a twenty-four-hour period. A slightly better diet can seem successful for months or even years. Only the most complete diets, however, can provide health generation after generation.
Diet books that adopt this long-term philosophy such as Paleodiet, Evolution Diet, and Health Secrets of the Stone Age have been incredibly successful partly by virtue of the philosophy itself, which has intuitive appeal. Fleshing out the bare bones of the nutritional philosophy with specifics—real ingredients and real recipes—is another matter. Authors of previously published books are still working on the old random mutation model, and so fail to account for how quickly genetic change can occur. In going all the way back to the prehistoric era, they take the idea too far to be practical. Their evidence is so limited it’s literally skeletal—gleaned from campfire debris, chips of bone, and the cleanings of mummified stomachs. These books do give us fascinating glimpses of life in the distant past. And I’m impressed by how the authors use modern physiologic science to expand tiny tidbits of data into complete dietary regimes. But each of these books, often citing the same information, leaves us with contradicting advice. Why? The data they have is simply too fragmented, too old, and too short on detail to give us meaningful guidance. How can we reproduce the flavors and nutrients found in our Paleolithic predecessors’ dinners when the only instructions they left behind come in the form of such artifacts as “the 125,000-year-old spear crafted from a yew tree found embedded between the ribs of an extinct straight-tusked elephant in Germany” and “cut marks that have been found on the bones of fossilized animals.”17
The authors do their best to make educated guesses, but clearly a creative mind could follow this ancient trail of evidence to end up wherever they like.
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on prehistory or educated guesses.
There is a much richer, living source of information available to us. It’s called cuisine. Specifically, authentic cuisine. By “authentic,” I’m not talking about the Americanized salad-and-seafood translation of Mediterranean or Okinawan or Chinese diets. I’m not talking about modern molecular gastronomy or functional food or fast food. The authentic cuisine I’m referring to is what fondest memories are made of.
It’s the combination of ingredients and skills that enable families in even the poorest farming communities around the world to create fantastic meals, meals that would be fit for a king and that would satisfy even the snarkiest of New Yorkers—even, say, a food connoisseur whose glance has been known to weaken many a Top Chef contender’s knees. I am of course referring to former punk-rock-chef-turned-world-trot-ting-celebrity, Anthony Bourdain.
As evidence that there’s plenty of detailed information surviving to inform us exactly how people used to eat (and still should), I submit Bourdain’s travel TV show No Reservations, which ran from 2005 until 2012. Bourdain served up the colorful, vastly inventive, and diverse world of culinary arts for an hour each week in your living room.
Bourdain got right to the heart of his host country’s distinct food culture, beginning each show by casting a historical light on the local food.
Guided by food-wise natives, he ended up at the right spots to sample food that captured each geographical region’s soul. More often than not, these spots were the mom-and-pop holes-in-the-wall where people cook food the way it has been cooked in that country for as long as anyone can remember. Shows like Bourdain’s have helped to convince me that, culinarily speaking, growing up in America is growing up in an underdeveloped country.
While Americans have hot dogs and apple pie, Happy Meals, meatloaf, casseroles, and variations on the theme of salad, citizens of other countries seem to have so much more. In one region of China, a visitor could experience pit-roasted boar, rooster, or rabbit, with a side of any number of different kinds of pickles or fermented beans, hand-crafted noodles, or fruiting vegetation of every shape, size, color, and
texture. In burgeoning, ultramodern cities, at the base of towering glass buildings around the world, farmers markets still sell the quality, local ingredients pulled from the earth or fished from the rivers and lakes that morning. My point is not to suggest that America isn’t a wonderful country with our own rich history of cuisine. My point is that we’re out of touch with our roots. That disconnection is the biggest reason why we have bookshelves full of conflicting nutritional advice. It’s also why, though many of us still have good genes, we have not maintained them very well. Like plump grapes left to bake on a French hillside, American chromosomes are wilting on the vine. They can be revitalized simply by enjoying the delightful products of traditional cuisine.
The messy amalgamation of vastly different dishes comprising every authentic cuisine can be cleaved into four neat categories, which I call the Four Pillars of World Cuisine. We need to eat them as often as we can, preferably daily. They are:
1. Meat cooked on the bone
2. Organs and offal (what Bourdain calls “the nasty bits”) 3. Fresh (raw) plant and animal products
4. Fermented and sprouted foods—better than fresh!
These categories have proved to be essential by virtue of their ubiquitousness. In almost every country other than ours people eat them every day. They’ve proved to be successful by virtue of their practitioners’ health and survival. Like cream rising in a glass, these traditions have percolated upward from the past, buoyed by their intrinsic value. They have endured the test of time simply by being delicious and nutritious, and in celebrating them we can reconnect with our roots and with each other, and bring our lives toward their full potential.